This study attempted to investigate the effects of school experience on visual perception tests involving line figures and forms. There were two experiments in this study. Experiment 1 examined the independent and interactive influences of school experience and chronological age in kindergarten children. Experiment 2 compared the effects of kindergarten and first grade curricula on performance on visual perception tests. In experiment 2, a test-retest design was used with kindergarten and first grade children whose birthdays were close to the December 1 cut-off date, so that the two groups were less than one month apart in age. The tests used were the Developmental Test of Visual Perception, the Visual Memory Test, the Visual Motor Gestalt Test, the Visual Sequential Memory subtest of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities, the Southern California Figure-Ground Visual Perception Test, and the Visual III from the Reading Aptitude Tests. The results of experiment 2 suggested that the interaction effects indicated a greater change in six months for the kindergarten children in comparison to the first grade children. Also, the present normative groups based on age penalize the child who is among the older children in his grade. (WR)

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